Saturday, November 17, 2012

Nikola Tesla, Inventor, Genius, Advocate for Eugenics

I so did not want to know this.
If Tesla was a creepazoid where is one to look for inspiration?
Marconi? Westinghouse?
From io9:

Despite his own mental illness, Nikola Tesla advocated eugenics for the year 2100

Nikola Tesla is often cited as geekdom's favorite inventor—advocate
of alternating current, pursuer of wireless electricity and the death
ray—but some of his beliefs about the future of science and culture
wouldn't be quite so popular today. In addition to his predictions about
labor-saving robots and his claims that his death ray would put an end
to war, Tesla predicted that eugenics programs would improve the human
race of the 21st century. Matt Novak of Paleofuture points us to an article in the February 9, 1935 issue of Liberty Magazine, titled "A Machine To End War."
In it, Tesla plays futurist, offering his predictions on society and
technology for the century ahead. Some fans of Tesla might be surprised
to learn of his unquestioning belief in the virtues of sterilization and
strategic human mating:

The year 2100 will see
eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the
survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains.
Then man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless
workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed
the unfit. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization
and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization
and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct. Several European
countries and a number of states of the American Union sterilize the
criminal and the insane. This is not sufficient. The trend of opinion
among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly
no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce
progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to
mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.

While
Tesla certainly wasn't alone in his eugenics advocacy, Novak notes that
his statement here is a bit ironic given that Tesla's own mental
illness might have branded him as "undesirable" for producing progeny.
But it follows with Tesla's other predictions for future physical
fitness. He predicted that a Secretary of Hygiene and Physical Culture
would be the most important US cabinet position by 2035, and that
stimulants like coffee, tea, and tobacco would fall out of vogue.
(Alcohol, on the other hand, would endure as "a veritable elixir of
life.")...MORE